Texas Originals

Born in 1916, Henry B. González was the first Mexican American to represent Texas in Congress. An expert on the nation's banking system, he oversaw the 1989 savings and loan bailout, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He also led efforts to overhaul public housing and increase transparency at the Federal Reserve. González was reelected eighteen times and became the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress.

Born in 1888, Walter Prescott Webb remains one of Texas's most significant and influential scholars. Webb taught at The University of Texas throughout his career. He served as director of the Texas State Historical Association and spearheaded the creation of The Handbook of Texas, the definitive encyclopedia of the state's history. In 1950, a survey of historians identified his 1931 study The Great Plains as the single most important work in U.S. history written since the turn of the century.

Civil rights leader James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920. Though he originally planned to become a Methodist minister, the influence of legendary teacher Melvin Tolson—and segregation within the church—led Farmer to activism. In 1942, Farmer organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago. A decade before the civil rights movement made headlines, CORE followed Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action to fight racial discrimination, pioneering the tactics that eventually dismantled segregation in the South.

Henry Allen Bullock devoted his life to advancing African American education in Texas—and made history in the process. His history of African American education in the South earned him the Bancroft Prize. He testified for the inclusion of African American history in Texas history textbooks and served on the Texas advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 1969, he became the first African American appointed to the faculty of arts and sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.

The scholar and writer Américo Paredes was born in Brownsville in 1915. Even as a youth, he saw that a distinct culture had emerged in the Rio Grande Valley—not just Mexican or American, but a blend of the two. Paredes made the border the focus of his career. He studied and celebrated the distinctive stories and humor of the lower Rio Grande, at the same time fighting to correct prejudice against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Tomás Rivera's career as a writer and educator was shaped by the struggles of his family, who spent much of their lives as farm laborers following the annual harvests from Texas to the Midwest. Rivera's landmark 1971 novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra—or, in English translation, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him—portrays the terrible conditions faced by Mexican American farm workers. Later in life, as a university administrator, Rivera committed himself to supporting first-generation college students such as himself.

Folklorist and oral history pioneer Mody Boatright was no stranger to the tall tale. Raised in a West Texas ranching family in the early twentieth century, he was descended from pioneers, cattlemen, and merchants. He grew up immersed in stories of the Texas frontier.

Born in 1844, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis was one of the most important Texas writers of the nineteenth century. Her novel The Wire-Cutters is set during the Texas fence-cutting wars of the 1880s, when ranchers began restricting access to large sections of the previously open range. The Wire-Cutters is now recognized as one of the first "westerns" in American literary history.

Once described as the "Gertrude Stein of San Antonio," Marion Koogler McNay created the first museum of modern art in Texas. Over the course of her life, she collected European and American art, and especially loved the art of the American Southwest. McNay bequeathed her expansive residence, acreage, and more than 700 works of art to San Antonio in 1950. Today, the McNay Art Museum is one of the state's cultural treasures, boasting a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georgia O'Keefe, and other European and American masters.

Born to a sharecropping family in northeast Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman became the world’s first female African American aviator. Her daredevil feats in air shows captivated crowds and earned her the nickname "Brave Bessie." An advocate for equal rights, Coleman encouraged young African Americans to fly, and she refused to participate in air shows that disallowed black attendance. In 1929, a flying school for African Americans was founded in her honor in Los Angeles, ensuring her legacy as a pioneer in aviation and civil rights.